James Baldwin

Somehow, I'd never read a word by James Baldwin until this past Friday...I knew a few things about him, ex-patriate to France, sparring partner of Truman Capote and Gore Vidal back then, The Fire Next Time. Maybe because none of my high school English class syllabi happened to include Go Tell It On the Mountain, I'd never actually picked anything up and read it.

I happened to read a story called "Sonny's Blues" in a collection of short stories and was fairly entranced. The story of a man watching his dissolute jazz musician younger brother fall further into heroin addiction, it has the power of both conveying the time it which it is set (the early 1950's) and being timeless in its portrayal of the hopelessness of observing a loved one's self-destructive compulsions.

The story is calm and bleak (we are told with a thud that the narrator's baby daughter has recently died, just to add to the heavies) and yet closes with an extended scene of a triumphant performance by the brother at the piano, among his jazzbo peers who admire and respect him, and the narrator can at last see his lttle brother as the king of his drug-sordid milieu, but, moreover, respected for his musical skill.

The story felt to me like a cool-jazz era fictional take on Lester Bangs's essay "Peter Laughner Is Dead." Ordered a collection of James Baldwin stories to see what the hell else he was doing...